On Centre Street this week, as the TV reporters did their stand-ups and horrible things played out before the cameras, the ghosts of tabloids past hovered in the vicinity. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Donald Trump and New York City’s press corps existed in a perpetual waltz, one-one-two-one-one-two, as gushy news stories appeared by turns with others that dinged him. His working relationships with gossip reporters, as source and as subject, were simply part of his daily business. (Everyone now knows about “John Barron,” the imaginary representative of the Trump Organization whose words originated from Trump’s own mouth.) He was, back then, mostly a publicity hound among many, a real-estate guy with a galactic ego who was out for ink, a cartoon of a rich man distinguished by his unusual PR skills. Absurd, but hardly a risk to the planet. Only when his New York operation was basically out of steam in the early 2000s did he rebrand himself for national consumption via The Apprentice, and we all know where that led.

New York, though its brief is quite different from the tabloids’, exists in part to cover the city’s intricate tiers of wealth and power. (Trump always aspired to the upper levels thereof, and eventually just circumvented them.) Owing to that lust for the top as well as his mouthiness and show-offiness, he was a natural subject for us, and it didn’t hurt that — although it’s hard to grasp it now, as his carapace of grievance has hardened — he could, in his obnoxious wiseass way, be occasionally charming and often funny. Edward Kosner, who edited this magazine from 1980 to 1993, tells a story in his memoir (published in 2006) of attending a championship fight with Trump in Atlantic City. “The high point of the evening was always The Walk, led by Trump through the casino,” he recalled. “As Donald strode through the great room, the sea of gamblers parted … Here were thousands of working people gambling away their hard-earned money into the bulging pockets of the country’s most famous multimillionaire, and they were cheering him. Trump had somehow persuaded them that he was one of them.”

So even though we as an institution saw through the man, we were, I suppose semi-wittingly, pumping oxygen into the firebox. Trump, his wives, and (in one weird instance) his yacht appeared on our cover more than a dozen times before the 2016 campaign. A frequent New York contributor, Tony Schwartz, wrote a somewhat tart feature about Trump that the subject nonetheless admired, so much so that he brought him on to ghostwrite The Art of the Deal. (Schwartz has since copped to his part in manufacturing Trump’s narrative.) When in 2016 it became clear that Trump was the likely Republican nominee — and the presumed loser in the general election — we went over our archives and assembled a huge array of quotes, images, and observations from more than three decades’ coverage, under the title “Our Trump Dump.” It’s worth revisiting now, as the latest act in this exhausting, overlong drama proceeds. This one will be written mostly by 12 jurors and a judge.